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Talk: Alice Paul

Talk: Alice Paul, Iron-Jawed Angel

Event details

Talk: Alice Paul, Iron-Jawed Angel

Join an audience that loves talking back to history to discuss Women’s Suffrage and Alice Paul, the Iron-Jawed Angel – with Dr. Melissa Walker.

How did a nice young Quaker woman with BA from Swarthmore and an MA & PhD from U Penn, end up being force-fed in a city jail and confined to a prison psychiatric ward? As the psychiatrist who examined her said: “Courage in women is often mistaken for Insanity.”

Alice Paul and her “Silent Sentinels” were beaten, jailed and force-fed on their crusade to obtain the right to vote for American women. Their charge for arrest: blocking traffic. In 1923 she proposed an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. She fought for it until her death in 1977. A revised version was passed by Congress in 1974, but has yet to be ratified. – Let’s talk about it.

This event is NOT a costumed performance. (Leslie Goddard will perform as Alice Paul in the History Alive Festival June 15 -24.)

The outcry for Women’s Suffrage was International as the 20th century began. The colonies of New Zealand and Australia were the first to jump aboard and by 1920 Britain and the US had joined. It was in England that Alice Paul joined the women’s suffrage efforts and learned militant protest tactics, including picketing and hunger strikes.

This Alice Paul Talk is a part of Upstate International Month promoting our rich cultural diversity, heritage, and global connections through a variety of internationally themed events. Upstate International Month is produced by Upstate International in collaboration with their community partners.

Melissa Walker, PhD is Emerita George Dean Johnson, Jr. Professor of History at Converse College where she taught for 21 years. She earned her PhD at Clark University, and her work focused on the study of past women’s efforts to become autonomous and fulfilled human beings and on projects that empower today’s women.

She is the author or editor of nine books including, All We Knew Was To Farm: Rural Women in the Upcountry South, 1919-1941.

Since her retirement, she has joined Spartanburg Regional Hospital System as their staff historian, and she founded a personal and career coaching service, Heyday Coaching. In that role, she supports clients in achieving their personal and professional goals.

Little in Alice Paul’s quiet, comfortable Quaker upbringing suggested she would become a leader of the militant wing of the largest movement for political change in U.S. history and a pioneer of nonviolent social protest.

Born in New Jersey in 1885, she was raised with a sense of gender equality. “When the Quakers were founded,” she said, “one of their principles was and is equality of the sexes. So I never had any other idea.”

After graduating from Swarthmore College, she studied in England and joined the militant wing of the British suffragette movement, enduring arrest and imprisonment. She returned to the U.S. in 1910 fired up for the cause.

Paul launched her American suffrage work by organizing a parade on March 3, 1913, the day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration. The parade disintegrated as spectators began harassing marchers, attacking them, and pulling women off floats. The spectacle and violence made front-page headlines.

In 1914, she launched her own suffrage association, the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage and then an independent political party, the National Woman’s Party, both committed to a constitutional amendment enfranchising women and to publicity-driven, nonviolent action.

Paul’s remarkable ability to inspire drew followers to her and aroused them to courageous action. Although tiny and frequently in poor health, she was a tireless worker who fearlessly put herself on the line and rarely sought personal acclaim.

On January 10, 1917, Paul launched her most daring tactic. She organized volunteers to stand outside the White House, holding banners in the Congressional Union’s white, yellow, and purple and with questions such as, “Mr. President, How Long Must Women Wait for Liberty?”

No one had ever before picketed the White House. Some, including Wilson, coldly ignored them. A few complemented them. Many accused them of being undignified, petty, and distinctly unladylike.

When the United States entered World War I that April, opinions intensified. Many now saw the picketers as unpatriotic and even disloyal. Crowds began to gather, shouting insults, and eventually shoving or attacking the picketers.

In June, picketers began to be arrested for “obstructing traffic” and imprisoned, usually at a workhouse in Virginia. But the picketing continued, as did the arrests and the prison terms, which gradually increased in length. Imprisoned suffragists resisted prison rules, which drew increasing brutality.

By late summer, suffragists, including frail, older women, were being beaten, pushed and thrown into cold, unsanitary cells. When Paul herself was arrested, she was sentenced to a staggering seven-month jail term. She immediately organized a hunger strike. Prison officials responded by force-feeding Paul and several other strikers in a tortuous method.

Finally, in 1919, both houses of Congress passed the women’s suffrage amendment. A little more than a year later, the required thirty-six states ratified it, and it was signed into law on August 26, 1920.

For Paul, the fight was not over. In 1923, she authored the first version of the Equal Rights Amendment, which she would champion until her death.

Paul lived to see Congress pass the ERA in 1972. But she suffered a stroke in 1974 and died three years later at the age of 92, too soon to know the ERA would not be ratified.

Alice Paul is not widely remembered today, but recently she has been receiving new interest. The 2014 HBO movie Iron-Jawed Angels told her story, with Hilary Swank playing Alice Paul.

And in 2016, the Treasury announced plans to redesign the back of the ten-dollar bill with a depiction of the 1913 women’s suffrage parade she organized and with portraits of five suffrage leaders – including Alice Paul.

When the Quakers were founded, one of their principles was and is equality of the sexes. So I never had any other idea, the principle was always there.

We women of America tell you that America is not a democracy. Twenty million women are denied the right to vote.

When you put your hand to the plow, you can’t put it down until you get to the end of the row.

It is incredible to me that any woman should consider the fight for full equality won. It has just begun. There is hardly a field, economic or political, in which the natural and unaccustomed policy is not to ignore women…Unless women are prepared to fight politically they must be content to be ignored politically.

I never doubted that equal rights was the right direction. Most reforms, most problems are complicated. But to me there is nothing complicated about ordinary equality.

There will never be a new world order until women are a part of it.

Unless women are prepared to fight politically they must be content to be ignored politically.

Mr. President how long must women wait to get their liberty? Let us have the rights we deserve.

This world crisis came about without women having anything to do with it. If the women of the world had not been excluded from world affairs, things today might have been different.